Bob Cox sent in this press release from Cornell on a study by Cornell University librarians shows that many URLs, cited in student term-paper bibliographies often are incorrect or refer to documents that no longer exist. I\'m sure it\'s just a coincidence! Why would a student make up a URL?

They suggest that professors set guidelines for acceptable citations in course assignments. Also, they believe that collegiate libraries should create and maintain scholarly portals for authoritative web sites with a commitment to long-term access and instruct students on how to critically evaluate resources.

Carol Ann Hughes, the head of collections at Questia.com, has a new article out in Dlib called Information Services for Higher Education
A New Competitive Space. She writes, \"Any organization that undertakes an educational mission in our society is now and will increasingly be surrounded by alternative information service suppliers ... it is likely that ... alternatives will come from the for-profit sector.\"

COLLIB-L, the listserv of the ACRL College Libraries Section, is giving us a lot of good material here at LISNews. As a sort of a sequel to my article in Library Juice 3:27, Questioning Questia, I published (with permission) a thread of discussion on that listserv about Questia, the virtual library product that will bypass academic libraries themselves and go straight to the student. (You don\'t need a musty, crusty old institution, fork over your beer money and get your books in e-form, all set for cutting and pasting!) I\'m worried about Questia and I hope they change their business plan and become a vendor to libraries.

\"My friends used to go to the periodicals section and walk up and down the aisles looking for cute guys. Once they found one, they would use generic pick-up lines to start conversation and hopefully get asked out,\" said Amber King, 20, a junior from Memphis, Tenn., majoring in marketing communications.

Charles Davis writes \"The British Library has suspended sales of historic newspapers after a public outcry.
It had disposed of up to 60,000 bound volumes of newspapers in
unpublicised deals in the past four years. All the newspapers were foreign.
The library said it had not broken its legal obligation to collect and maintain
British printed material.
The library, caught out by the controversy, said yesterday that it would make
no further disposals until it had undertaken \"a complete review of microfilm copies\". The recent disposals include long runs of newspapers from most
European countries, the United States, Latin America and pre-revolutionary
Russia.
Story from \"Daily Telegraph\" 24 November 2000http://www.telegraph.co.uk

The University of Pennsylvania Libraries just got their 5 millionth volume, a rare hagadah. Unfortunately, their rare book collection is underutilized by the student body. What is so special about a rare book collection if nobody uses it. Excite has the story.\"Like the rest of Penn\'s unusual or uncommon 250,000 printed books, over 10,000 linear feet of manuscript collections, and more than 1,500 codex manuscripts -- many one-of-a-kind maps, broadsides, playbills, programs, photographs, prints, drawings and sound recordings -- are housed in the collection. And in about 10 minutes, you or any other Penn student can sit down, request and read from the same copy of Paradise Lost that Milton once held in his own hands or browse through its recently acquired hagadah.\"

Questia Media is hoping to entice students to pay as much as
$360 a year for online access to searchable books and
journals. The Chronicle
has the Full
Story. Questia
says it will have more than 50,000 scholarly books and
journals by January, then they\'ll sell subscriptions for $20
or $30 a month, it allows the students to copy and \"paste\"
much easier.

....the service\'s search-and-copy features
respond to the way students really do their papers. \"They\'re
not reading the books,\" says Troy Williams.